Chapter 40
We sleep for a time, then arrive in Bath in the morning. I’m weary and sore, having slept in my corset. I don’t think I’ll fully sleep until the decision has been entered, and Cecil is with me again. It’s like holding my breath, and until that call comes, I’m merely biding time.
But then I witness my mother singing opera on stage.
Words are insufficient to express the richness, the sheer volume that reverberates through the Lyceum when my mother opens her mouth. She is slender and restrained, yet she manages to release a sound as magnificent as the ornate theater itself.
How could I ever have given this up? Even if I had to leave Cornwall, I would have had Mum every day…and this. It’s stirring and enrapturing and I cannot look away. I close my eyes and remember feeling this swell of grandeur.
I reach out to squeeze AJ’s hand, but of course he isn’t there.
I long for what I thought he was, especially when my mother’s voice, singing of the angst of lost love, echoes through the theater.
His entrance is stirring, then the woman’s love sweeps her up, draping her backward over his arm, I will them to kiss. I long for it.
They never do.
Afterward, I hurry down the stairs where Mum told me to look for her dressing room and she’s there, rosy and wide-eyed and more alive than I’ve ever seen her. “Did you enjoy it, Merryn darling?”
“It was splendid!”
She’s animated now. Talkative. I bask in the sound of her voice. I manage to circle the conversation back to why I left when the unexpected piece of the puzzle makes himself known just outside the door. His hoarse voice, his raspy laughter, jar something loose in my hazy mind.
Sebastien. I know the name without even seeing him.
You cannot have me all to yourself, you greedy girl.
Mum’s voice, years ago. Sebastien is only here for a fortnight, so why can’t we all enjoy each other?
She is playful and affectionate. She tickles me, but I resist the manipulation of forced laughter, because deep down I am not joyful and things are not right.
Even after all these years I recall the heaviness of his presence in our tiny cottage the one time Mum did bring him home.
His gaze upon me was entirely wrong, but he hadn’t even touched me.
So I escaped upstairs to my tiny room behind the curtain without explaining why.
Words cannot wrap around such feelings—not when you’re ten.
I spoke freely to Mum whenever she was home, but not about that.
I couldn’t think how to start, and I knew in my bones she would not like it.
Sebastien had offered to take me into Penzance for a new coat—I had refused.
How incredibly ungrateful, Mum had said.
He could have delivered me to my tutor’s house.
I walked alone, which was mulish. I dodged and dodged, hoping Mum would see, or he would leave.
But then, he and Mum left for Germany together, where she sang and he…did something. Managed her, I believed, as if his efforts would bring any value to her work. He was too full of darkness. And it made me want to run.
Then when I was seventeen, Sebastien returned. He visited at Christmas and those greedy eyes stayed on me, prodding and invading. I didn’t have the words then to stop him. My voice was insufficient.
The past, if we’re willing to face it, brings stark clarity to the present. And the more I allow memories to seep back in, the more clarity they bring to what my life has become. I couldn’t trust anyone, even my mother.
“I ran away when I was seventeen, didn’t I?”
His laugh barks out again now from the hallway.
The words I needed to speak then nearly strangled me. Leave…me…
“Alone.” I finish in a whisper, and Mum looks up.
“Yes, alone.” She’s searching my eyes in the bright glow of her mirrors. “You hated nothing more. You hated when I left and couldn’t abide any man I ever brought home.”
The kaleidoscope of my childhood shifts into position with one important stone settled into place, completing another part of the picture. One in which I long for aloneness, but also for my mother, and finally that contradiction makes perfect sense.
A knock on the door. Sebastien lets himself in, his laughter lingering as he greets Mum with open arms. She runs to him, giddy and girlish, and he kisses both her cheeks.
She is seldom alone. Always on the arm of some man, anchored to someone, her countenance brightened by the one whose presence declares her beautiful and chosen. “Darling, look who it is. Oh, you’ve brought flowers.” She takes Sebastien’s bouquet, but his gaze is fixated over Mum’s shoulder—on me.
“How…ravishing.”
“Oh, stop.” Mum smacks him playfully on the shoulder as she blushes, and leans into this embrace.
You are the nightingale. The one afraid to be alone. I longed to cling to my mother in childhood, and she dropped my hand. She was too busy clinging to someone else’s.
I rise, holding her hands. “I must go. This has been lovely.”
“Yes, your husband. He’ll be cross with me for stealing you away, won’t he?”
AJ. My heart breathes his name, and with it surfaces the memory of those dancers on the stage who nearly kiss…but do not.
“When do you leave?”
“I shall check the schedule.”
Her gaze clings to me, silently imploring. “You will…write to me? Sometimes?”
I turn away from her eager face and the oppressive scent of Sebastien’s tobacco. It isn’t that I don’t wish to be around my mother. My leaving was never about her all those years ago, but about who came along with her. How would I explain such a thing? I cannot, so silence is my only answer.
“Goodbye then, love.” Mum’s voice is quick and efficient as she rises to embrace me, but there’s an undercurrent of hurt as she tries to brush over my silence.
This squeezes my heart to the point of breaking. Say it. Just say it.
She leans forward and a handmade necklace falls from the neckline of her gown.
A string of pearls—no, seashells. Tiny flesh-colored shells from Cornwall.
We collected them together—that’s all I can recall.
For hours we scoured the beach, cleaned them, threaded them onto the string. I had one, too…somewhere.
I embrace her and kiss the top of her head. “Yes, of course.” I smile as she leans back. “We’ll write. And if you find yourself in Cornwall…alone…I shall meet you there.”
Her face, moist with longing, breaks into a smile. “I should like that. An annual holiday, perhaps. If you can spare the time.”
“For my mum, I can spare the time.” I squeeze her hand and offer a smile to seal the promise.
I’ve gathered shards of my past self since leaving for Cornwall, piled them alongside everything I built of my current self, and now I see them laid out.
There are good and bad parts to each. In both lives I haven’t much control over what becomes of me, where I live, or even what is done with my money.
But I have the benefit of deciding moment by moment, stone by stone, who I will be. And I have a lot to say about that.
When I fall asleep tonight on the train, tossing and turning, I see a tranquil face with a neat mustache smiling at me.
I see stormy green-gold eyes challenging me.
My mind wanders from Newlyn art school to Pittville Park to the dramatic opera and the kiss that definitely should have occurred.
Floating in that restless place between wake and sleep, I am overcome by the sensation of being kissed by AJ—really and truly kissed in a way that shuts out the rest of the world and causes everything I’ve ever worried about to blow away like dust.
I want to trust him. My heart is used to it, somehow, but something happened years ago. Something significant and black and heavy between that life and the Newlyn one that my mind cannot—will not—penetrate. What happened in that carriage before it went over? What can’t I remember?
Why did he come for me again in Cheltenham? Why did he truly come?
How I wish I could see inside the man’s head right this moment.